


History

by iridescentglow



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-02-17
Updated: 2005-02-17
Packaged: 2017-12-23 14:10:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/927418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iridescentglow/pseuds/iridescentglow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Veronica and Duncan break up. Again. (If history can't repeat, it distorts.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	History

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes canon as it stands in #1.08, 'Like A Virgin'

       
_  
Veronica   
_   


    Veronica inspects Duncan's face sometimes, looking for echoes, patterns, **truth**.

     The way his mouth curls to the side slightly as he leans down to kiss her. The square, blunt shape of his hands as they push against the hem of her skirt. The places where his hair is cut with streaks of white-gold; the exact shade that they glow in the sun as he walks away. Are these features, traits, characteristics that she shares? She looks deep in his eyes, hoping to find a certain colour; a certain cadence as he murmurs her name.

    "You and Duncan, huh? On again, off again, on, off . . . you're a regular carousel." Logan dropped his head close to Veronica's ear, keeping his voice low and provocative. He folded himself into her personal space, so that when she turned, she found that he had almost succeeded in pinning her to the bank of lockers. "You make me _dizzy_." His lips were inches from hers.

     Veronica blinked, and found that he had withdrawn, although his hand still rested at the top of her locker. She slammed the locker shut abruptly, but without quite managing to trap his fingers. His hand crumpled quickly into a fist, and he grinned.

    "You should see the school nurse about those dizzy spells, Logan," Veronica said matter-of-factly. "Also, about your masochistic tendency to create situations that could well lead to severe bodily damage." She smiled sweetly, and began to walk away.

    " _Oh_ ," she threw the word over her shoulder. "Duncan and I are definitely _off_."

     Of course Logan knew. Her own surveillance skills were nothing compared to the almost psychic web of knowledge he had fashioned at Neptune High. Almost no one was safe from the deadly combination of Echolls money, power and charm. For that matter, Duncan had probably told Logan himself. She had noticed it in the rare moments they had spent alone together before Lilly's murder. A certain glint in his eye, a softening around his mouth; the way he made you want to tell him every last one of your secrets.

    Logically, it shouldn't be a secret at all. It should be lead story on the TV station: _Duncan and Veronica, reunited and it feels so good!_ Not just for the two of them, but for the entire school population, it should be a return to normalcy; a glorious détente, an end to the nightmare of The Lilly Kane Murder. Something about it felt irredeemably _wrong_ , though. And it was that feeling that made her want it kept secret that she and Duncan were, in whatever ill-defined sense, back together.

    Veronica slowed her pace once she was sure that Logan had not followed her. The hallways were beginning to clear of the pre-class crush. She ducked past the open doorway of her own 5th period English class (blah blah Shakespeare blah blah _Hamlet_ blah blah Ophelia's unhealthy relationship with Laertes blah blah).

     It was with a mix of apprehension and anticipation that she approached the top floor bathroom. Each time they arranged to meet there, Veronica hoped he wouldn't turn up. She pushed open the door. It was a small bathroom, tucked away from most of the classrooms and easily forgotten by students and teachers alike. Lilly had been a master at subterfuge: she'd scrawled 'FLOODED - DO NOT USE' in magic marker across a piece of construction paper, and tacked it to the door whenever she and Logan had used the bathroom for their legendary makeout sessions. Veronica was less crafty, and left the door as it was. Maybe part of her hoped they would be caught.

    Veronica found the bathroom empty. She circled it once, her shoes squeaking loudly against the floor. She stopped herself before it devolved into anxious pacing. _He's not going to come._ She assured herself of this fact. He would finally break the cycle. She, in turn, would be able to stop this ill-advised backslide and/or disturbed detective mission into her paternity. _Good news all round_ , she thought blackly. She leaned back against the sink counter, its ceramic slick and cold to her touch. She hauled herself up onto the ledge, clicking her heels hard against the tile as she swung her legs.

    Veronica recalled Lilly's luridly detailed accounts of exactly what she did with Logan in the top floor bathroom. "It's all about the tile," she would say. "It always stays so cold, even when—" Veronica would scream lightheartedly and block her ears as Lilly rolled through the kama sutra, Neptune High-style. Lilly's laughter, at its most raucous and exuberant, tinged every memory. "Duncan's not so chaste, you know, Veronica," Lilly had said once, archly and without elaboration.

    The door to the bathroom opened suddenly.

    Part of Veronica was not surprised to find that Logan had followed her after all. If he were to actively seek her out in her worst moments, he could not more exclusively appear to be the harbinger of her shame and humiliation. At her moment of death, Veronica would be unsurprised to find her grim reaper dressed in crisp YvesSaintLaurent black robes and bearing the face of Logan Echolls. He slipped inside the door, pushing it closed behind him. To Veronica, the space suddenly felt more claustrophobic than ever. She was careful to keep her face blank, loosely disdainful, merrily unconcerned.

    "Been stood up, 'Roni?" asked Logan, quirking his head.

    "You mean you weren't the one who sent me the Valentine's card asking me to meet you here?" Veronica feigned wide-eyed surprise. "Aw, _shucks_."

     Logan's expression soured visibly, his smile hardening.

    "I know what's going on between you and Duncan," he said.

    Veronica's voice was suddenly cold: "You don't have the slightest compre _hen_ sion of what is going on between me and Duncan."

    Logan moved nearer. "I know more than you think," he said doggedly.

    Veronica's leg bounced against the tiled wall. Even as she stared Logan down, she still felt the inexplicable desire to tell him everything: _Duncan's my brother Duncan's my brother Duncan's my—_  


     Logan placed a hand on her bare calf, halting her leg's anxious bounce.

    "Lilly and I used to spend _hours_ in here," he said, his voice sinking to a murmur. His gaze left hers, his eyes trailing instead down her legs. He flattened his palm against her calf, twisting his fingers so they caught in the hollow of her knee. "We'd come out after and I wouldn't know what day it was. Like the world had speeded up— or stopped completely."

     He pushed apart her legs, only very slightly, and with a gentleness that made her vision dim. He moved his left hand to rest on her knee, while his right hand continued its slide up her other leg. He grazed her inner thigh with the blunt edge of his fingernail, and stopped.

    "You don't look like her any more," he said, his gaze refocusing on her face. "It was our joke. Me and Duncan. How similar our girlfriends looked." He paused, leaning closer so that his lips brushed her cheek. "But you're all wrong now." 

    Veronica moved her head slightly, so that the side of her face touched his, almost nuzzling. "She told me all about you," she whispered softly. " _Logan's such a good kisser. Logan's so good with his hands. Logan can make me come ten different ways . . ._ "

    The sneering bite crept back into her voice as she spoke. Her knees snapped upward abruptly, knocking his hands away. She aimed for his balls, but he writhed gracefully clear of her kick. He recovered his hands quickly, grasping her securely by the upper arms. He remained painfully close.

    "I know why you and Duncan broke up," Logan reasserted, his voice louder as he strove for control. (Veronica swatted at him in annoyance, but his hands held her upper body in place.)

    "You don't."

    "I know why you'll never live happily ever after," he said. (Veronica's arm movements slowed, her hands resting grudgingly on his shoulders.)

    "No."

    "Because he'll never love you as much as he loved Lilly," Logan finished, his eyes glinting.

    Veronica's forearms tightened at Logan's neck. She leaned forward, burdening him suddenly with her weight. She kissed him hard, tasting the bitter words; all the secrets, the lies, the memories.

*

      
 _Duncan_  

  


       

  


       

     Duncan had made out with a blonde at a party soon after Lilly's death. (Logan had said, tonelessly, that a dead girlfriend was a good way to get laid.
  


       

    "She wasn't my girlfriend, though. She was my sister."
  


       

    "Same fucking difference.")
  


       

    The girl had looked at him with cow eyes, and when he had turned away in disgust, she had licked condolences into his ear. He'd thought, as her long blonde hair irritated his cheek, that she was a substitute for Veronica. Her ferocity was all wrong, though. His stomach had twisted as he remembered watching Lilly with Logan; that particular mix of playful and ferocious. The way her eyes would flash, demanding his submission; fingers threading everywhere; agitated tongue.
  


       

    Duncan had caught the girl's arms roughly, and pushed her away.
  


       

  


       

    In the weeks following Lilly's death, Duncan attended a lot of parties. Mixing his anti-depressants with too much alcohol reduced him to a constant haze. He retained only the sparsest memories of that time: cooling, unfocused snapshots burned with patches of sharp, vivid recollection. They strung together in his mind like a tingling movie montage of his own grief.
  


       

    It was with something like surprise that he returned home from one of the many anonymous parties to find Logan in his bedroom. Lilly's death, the dreary numbness that her absence had created in him, seemed to have removed his ability to be shocked. She had bequeathed him a callous apathy toward almost everything. He heard the hardness in his own voice as he asked, "What are you doing here?"
  


       

    It was 2am, but the spotlights outside (artfully arranged in the garden by his mother's designer) created a dim, shifting half-light that filtered through his ceiling-to-floor windows. It never seemed to get dark in Neptune; light pollution chased the night-time away. Logan moved his head slightly, although he remained in profile. He did not answer the question. Duncan's head ached, and he reached instinctively for the bottle of anti-depressants in his pocket. Extracting a single white pill, he placed it on his tongue and swallowed hard.
  


       

    The situation was all wrong. It was _Lilly_ who stumbled into his room late at night; exuberant from rum and coke, shouting slightly from an evening of loud music. Roaming his room like a vapour, she would trail the usual party cocktail of smoke and sweat and beer; a scent sharpened by her perfume. She would talk (carelessly, about everything and nothing at all) and he would listen. She would wind slowly down, until she folded herself into his arms and, anecdotes left unfinished, went to sleep.
  


       

     "I never did find out how Lucie Kennedy's dress got ruined at Halloween last year," Duncan said vaguely, the hardness gone from his voice.
  


       

    "Someone made pumpkin punch," said Logan after a moment. "Or something orange, anyway. It was gross, either way -- even after they added the Jack Daniels." He paused. " _Especially_ after they added the Jack Daniels." A smile flickered briefly across his face. "Lucie told Marie that if she wanted to, she could steal you away from Veronica. So Lilly tipped the entire bowl of orange stuff over her."
  


       

     Logan took a step closer to Duncan, turning to face him. Dizziness gripped Duncan momentarily, as if Lilly's memory were a physical force. Logan's hand fumbled for his shoulder, steadying him. His fingers opened against the nape of his neck, his thumb rubbing distractedly at the place where his hair touched skin.
  


       

    " _Fuck_ ," Logan muttered, dropping his head so that it almost met Duncan's. "I miss her."
  


       

    Time seemed to slow, Duncan's dizziness transmuting into a fog of unreality. Lilly appeared once more, conjured in the corner of his mind. Very close by, Logan smelled of smoke and sweat and beer.
  


       

    When Logan finally kissed him, it was slow and deliberate. The part of Duncan's brain that admitted to thinking such thoughts, had decided long ago that Logan's style would be sloppy wantonness. But Logan's mouth moved over his with an almost detached precision. His hand, still grasping the back of Duncan's neck, held him firmly in place. Duncan recalled Lilly's kisses; the brief, open-mouthed ambushes that had accompanied her flamboyant hugs. A mere flicker of tongue that he could have sworn he imagined. Lilly's kisses were glorious and infrequent. Most often, they were pure performance: in front of their parents, to see the tightening of Mother's mouth and the tiny explosion in Father's brain. The kisses she bestowed in private were less ostentatious: warm and drowsy, with accompanying sighs or gentle laughter.
  


       

    Logan broke the kiss. His left hand still anchored Duncan, while his right hand began to unbutton his shirt. It was with mechanical slowness that he yanked apart the material. The heel of his hand came to rest on the waistband of Duncan's jeans, his fingers coaxing unconsciously at the bare skin of his lower abdomen. Duncan realized he had been holding his breath, and when he released in a sharp exhalation, he found that he was hard and _wanting_.
  


       

     "So what do you want to do?" Logan asked in a low voice. Duncan met his eyes briefly; they were shielded into mirrors of brutal sadness.
  


       

      
_I want you to suck my cock._ Duncan didn't know whether he had spoken the words aloud, but he blinked and found that Logan's mirrored eyes were downturned as he sank to his knees.
  


       

  


       

     They may have fucked a hundred times, but Duncan has forgotten all but that first time. It is a slippery pearl of a memory to be carefully shelved; a burning spot in the dull blur of his sorrow.
  


       

  


       

    Duncan sat in 5th period Biology class, staring out the window. The teacher's voice was a dull drone, like a wasp throwing itself repeatedly against the glass. They were learning about osmosis, and Duncan was barely paying attention. He was trying to recall the lesson about genetics from last year; silly diagrams of squares marked with "dominant" and "recessive". He couldn't remember: was it possible for parents with brown hair to produce blonde-haired children?
  


       

    He had aced the Biology final last year, even though his paper had left more than half the questions unanswered; the blank spaces filled instead with harsh, abstract doodles that ruled out across the page like crazed architectural plans. Miss Casper had handed the exam back to him with an attached condolence card. Funny how Lilly's death made him suddenly so good at Biology.
  


       

    Duncan looked down at his notebook. It was an esoteric mess of lines, charting the creation and decimation of perfect triangles and squares. He remembered sneaking a look at Veronica's folder during the previous year; finding dozens of beautifully elaborate, cloyingly sweet doodles to represent his name and their love. Logan, meanwhile, possessed a surprisingly deft touch, producing nimble sketches of Lilly in biro; turning her hair into the swirl of her name and her clothes into the petals of a flower. (Logan would scribble most of them through immediately, although a couple Lilly had stolen and pinned above her mirror at home.) Not for the first time during the period, Duncan glanced over at the seat adjacent to his. It was still empty.
  


       

    Miss Casper stopped speaking when Duncan raised his hand (he imagined the exhausted wasp dropping abruptly to its death). She hastened toward his seat at the back of the class, looking concerned.
  


       

    "I need to go to the bathroom," he said tonelessly.
  


       

    "Of course," Miss Casper murmured.
  


       

    "Thank you." Duncan closed his notebook, readying himself to leave.
  


       

    "Yes . . . _yes_." Miss Casper reached over to touch his arm. "Let me know if there's anything I can do."
  


       

     If Logan were there, he would have laughed, loudly and nastily. Duncan managed the smallest of nods and slipped out of his seat. Miss Casper did not give him a hallway pass. No one would stop Duncan Kane. If he were to pause and let off a dozen fireworks outside the teachers' lounge, no one would dare query it.
  


       

    As he began to climb the stairs, Duncan glanced down at the blue smudge on his forearm. He remembered rubbing vigorously at it with his thumb, but a faint outline of biroed words remained: _Veronica - 5th period_. It was written in her handwriting -- not as girly and precise as it had once been: these days she struck the _V_ as a harsh tick; the rest of her name straining forward in loose, hurried cursive.
  


       

     Duncan kept waiting for the world to realign into something perfect and palatable. A world where it was Friday afternoon and he cut class to meet Veronica should be sweet and uncomplicated. It was not a world where he would fuck his best friend in the shadows of his bedroom, or spend hours in the shower, jerking off to the memory of his dead sister.
  


       

    They would start telling people soon. _Duncan and Veronica, reunited and it feels so good!_ They would hold hands across the lunch table, kiss in the hallways; go out to dinner on Saturday night, stay in and watch movies on Sunday afternoon. An easy, precisely contained sort of bliss.
  


       

     Duncan found the door to the top floor bathroom ajar; a mere inch remaining open. He glimpsed a blur of colour and movement as his hand grasped the door handle. As his eyes refocused painfully, his slivered view resolved itself. Veronica's legs were wrapped around Logan's waist; her voice an indecipherable hiss as their lips met and tore apart, only to find each other again in frantic kisses.
  


       

    Duncan thought faintly that Lilly would have found the scene unsurprising. "Me and Logan. It's not like it's true love," she had said once, dabbing her lips with a sore, red colour as she looked at him in the bathroom mirror. The Lilly in his memory tasted of cherries as she bestowed him with a quick kiss. She shimmied backwards, out of the room and out of his mind.
  


       

    Duncan reached for his anti-depressants and placed a pill on his tongue. He swallowed hard. He turned and walked slowly back to Biology class.
  



End file.
